Get ready for another Apple meeting that could have been an email

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Is this event another non-event?

Apple started running virtual press events during the pandemic when in-person gatherings made little sense and at various times were frowned upon or literally illegal. But Apple has largely stuck with that format even as health concerns lessened and its own employees were herded back into the office. Why is that? Because virtual events have advantages far beyond the containment of disease.

Aside from avoiding the logistical headaches of getting a thousand bad-tempered journalists from around the world to the same place at the same time, a pre-recorded video presentation is much easier to run smoothly than a live performance. Remember when Craig Federighi introduced Face ID and the phone refused to unlock? Or when Steve Jobs’ clicker didn’t work? We’d never have seen those or any number of other gaffes if Apple had the ability to do another take or recreate the process with CGI. Pre-recorded keynotes are not immune to embarrassing errors of judgment, but they happen a lot less.

Nobody cringes harder than me when live performers get things wrong, and I absolutely get the attraction of virtual keynotes for Apple. But it does raise some awkward existential questions about why we need to bother with the elaborate charade that is a keynote presentation.

What, after all, is the point of a keynote? If it’s just to get information about new products, that can be done far more efficiently via a press release that you can read at your own speed; just the facts, no sitting through skits and corporate self-congratulation. Is it to be marketed by the best hypemen in the business? If that’s really something you want, you might as well get it from an ad: virtual keynotes give none of that dubious excitement and tribalistic sense of inclusivity you get with a live performance. And we’ve even lost the stress-test element of seeing an executive operating the product under extreme pressure.

What we’re left with is a strange hybrid: a long press release read out by a series of charisma-free executives, interspersed with advertisements. Which is fine, provided the information is at least worth the effort. But as far as tomorrow’s Let Loose event goes, the signs are not promising. It looks a lot like Apple wanted to use its spring 2024 event to launch both iPads and MacBooks but had to hold back the iPads as a result of production delays, and during the wait, the MacBooks were released via a quiet press release. Has anything new appeared in the meantime to fill the stage/screen time that would have been devoted to laptops? Perhaps. And perhaps not, in which case we’ll be getting an awful lot of filler about environmental policy.

It’s possible that Apple will come up with a surprise announcement Tuesday to blow our socks off: 2nd-gen AirPods Max, a new HomePod with a screen, or a revamped version of Siri that’s actually smart. Even a new standard iPad or iPad mini would be somewhat interesting. But it seems likely we’ll just get a new iPad Air (including a new larger-screen model), a new iPad Pro (with a fancy OLED screen and either an M3 or M4 processor), a new overpriced Magic Keyboard, and yet another Apple Pencil with a squeeze gesture. And a lot of viewers will wish Apple had saved us all the bother and sent out an email.

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It makes no sense to give the iPad Pro an M4 chip before the Mac.

Or, to take the opposite viewpoint… putting an M4 in an iPad Pro makes perfect sense.

Apple Q2 2024 earnings: Analysts’ expectations exceeded but iPhone sales down.

Podcast of the week

This week, Apple is holding an event dubbed “Let Loose.” So what new products will Apple introduce on May 7? That’s the focus of today’s show–we talk about what’s been rumored, what seems the most feasible, and what surprises may be in store.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

• Best password managers for Mac and iPhone.
• PureVPN for Mac review: Easy to use and offers reliable geo-unlocking.
• Journey Nexa review: The best MacBook sleeve I’ve ever used.
• Baseus Blade HD Laptop Power Bank review: Flat-out impressive.

The rumor mill

Speculation ramps up as ‘Let Loose’ billed as ‘different kind of Apple Event.’

Shock report: The new iPad Pro will skip straight to the M4 chip.

iPhone 16 mockups show vertical camera alignment, Pro sizing shakeup.

The iPad Pro’s OLED display will be ‘by far the best’ of any tablet.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

If your iPhone alarm stopped working in iOS 17.4.1, here’s a fix.

Safari to get an AI boost in iOS 18, macOS 15 with smarter search, web page ‘eraser’.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.